Many companies and other organizations operate computer networks that interconnect numerous computing systems to support their operations, such as with the computing systems being co-located (e.g., as part of a local network) or instead located in multiple distinct geographical locations (e.g., connected via one or more private or public intermediate networks). For example, data centers housing significant numbers of interconnected computing systems have become commonplace, such as private data centers that are operated by and on behalf of a single organization, and public data centers that are operated by entities as businesses to provide computing resources to customers. Some public data center operators provide network access, power, and secure installation facilities for hardware owned by various customers, while other public data center operators provide “full service” facilities that also include hardware resources made available for use by their customers. However, as the scale and scope of typical data centers have increased, the tasks of provisioning, administering, and managing the physical computing resources have become increasingly complicated.
The advent of virtualization technologies for commodity hardware has provided benefits with respect to managing large-scale computing resources for many customers with diverse needs, allowing various computing resources to be efficiently and securely shared by multiple customers. For example, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing machine (e.g., a server) to be shared among multiple users by providing each user with one or more virtual machines hosted by the single physical computing machine, with each such virtual machine being a software simulation acting as a distinct logical computing system that provides users with the illusion that they are the sole operators and administrators of a given hardware computing resource, while also providing application isolation and security among the various virtual machines.
Service providers may offer a large assortment of types of virtual machines optimized for different use cases. One virtual machine type may differ from another in terms of a combination of central processing units (CPUs), memory, storage, networking capacity, etc. For example, one virtual machine type may be optimized for general purpose use balancing compute, memory and network resources, while another virtual machine type may be compute-optimized featuring high performance CPUs. Another virtual machine type may be optimized for memory-intensive applications. Further, within each family of virtual machine types, a service provider may offer varying sizes of virtual machines in terms of number of CPUs, amount of memory, amount of local storage, etc.